News feminist philosophers can use

Malcom Gladwell, Oprah Winfrey and Implicit Biases January 8, 2010

Extremely serious, very informative if you are new to the area, but also great fun!

The topic here is race, but you can see how it could apply to associations with gender. The bad news, of course, is that what we feel implicitly is a matter of the images in our culture. We’re going to have to change the culture, including creating occasions when we and others have the positive experiences needed.

H/T to The Situationist, where you can find more links to their posts on bias AND a link to the IAT itself.

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4 Responses to “Malcom Gladwell, Oprah Winfrey and Implicit Biases”

I guess it’s thoseIAT he has been taking.
It is sort of confronting. There is some criticism to the results of those tests, but I still think they are solid.
I got more convinced when I saw Jennifer Eberhardt, here and I can recommend to start on part 1, not part 3.
I am not so much biased against people of colour, according to those tests, but to my horror, I appear to be biased against women in academia. I blame this culture!

I have spent years advocating for women in science, working on related issues, and so on, but I knew the results weren’t going to be too good when I took the IAT on women and science. Quickly pairing grandmothers and physicists was just beyond me.

My university is hosting a lecture by a grandmother type who won the Nobel Prize this year. That might help! :)

“We’re going to have to change the culture…” — Indeed, but the conjunction of these posts points to the fact that all the money is on the side of culture as it is now. To limit the impact of negative stereotypic fetishistic imagery, we’ll have to deal with capitalism too.
For work on this topic by Katherine Frith, Erving Goffman, and Sut Jhally:

It would be interesting to study how assumptions about race are promoted now. American society won’t allow them to be as patent as images of sex and gender, but evidently they continue to enter the subconscious.